Upside Down Text Generator

What is upside-down text?

Unicode contains characters that happen to look like other characters turned over. None of them were added for that purpose, but there are enough lookalikes scattered through the standard to fake a rotated alphabet.

Type your text and this returns two results. The rotated one substitutes those glyphs and reverses the order of the graphemes, so the string reads correctly once you turn it around. The mapped only one applies the same substitutions but leaves the order alone.

Why two results

Because rotating text is two separate operations and you do not always want both. Flipping each letter gets you the shapes. Reversing the sequence is what puts the last word where your eye lands first when the whole line is turned over. Do only the first and the text looks flipped but reads backwards.

Keeping them apart also makes the tool useful for inspecting what actually happened, which matters because the substitution is never complete.

Are there alternatives?

Rotating an image of the text is the honest version of this effect. It works with any font, handles every character, and cannot be broken by a device that lacks a glyph. It is also not text any more, so it cannot be copied, searched, or read by a screen reader.

For a different playful transform that keeps every character intact, try Alternating Case.

Fun facts and more info

Coverage is the catch. Unicode has no turned equivalent for every character, so anything without a match is passed through unchanged and sits the right way up among its flipped neighbours.

Rendering varies too. These glyphs come from many different blocks of the standard, added at different times for unrelated reasons, so whether they line up depends on the font and the device. A string that looks convincing in one place can look ragged in another.

Many of the substitutions are reversible, which makes this look a little like a cipher. It is not one, and text hidden this way is not hidden from anything except a casual glance.